From Country Singer to Marketing Executive

I Used to be...And Now I am...

by Mary Welch

May 2, 2008

When Donna Peeples was singing her country girl heart out at the Grand Ole Opry, she never thought the lessons learned as a country singer would serve her well in corporate America. But they do.

“There’s an element of performing every time I make a presentation to the executive leadership or my team, closing a sale or creating an impactful marketing campaign. The same techniques apply,” she says. Those techniques serve her well today in her role as vice president of sales and marketing at AGL Resources.

“Well, you have to respect your audience’s time and intellect. You have to engage them, capture their imagination and entertain them a bit,” she says. “And you have to appeal to their emotions by presenting or telling a compelling story that motivates them to action.”

Peeples started her career singing at church and school functions in Gwinnett County and in Buckhead. Her family helped found Gwinnett County, and she is the seventh generation to grow up on the family’s property in Duluth.

“We lived in Buckhead for a while, but I grew up singing at Christmas parties, just trying to perform everywhere I could. If there was a talent show, I was in it. My family was supportive, but my dad kept telling me to take typing classes.”

She put together a band and did paying gigs around the Southeast. As the lead singer of the Country Line Band, the group hit the road performing in honky-tonk bars, VFW halls and at country fairs. They sang a lot of cover songs as well as self-penned tunes. “It was a lot of fun but an awful lot of hard, hard work.”

It was while playing a Gwinnett County Fair that she was approached to compete as Miss Gwinnett County in the Miss Georgia Pageant. “I had never done pageants before,” she says. “I didn’t win the title, but I was named Miss Congeniality, which is better!”

Peeples made her way to Nashville and worked for time with TNN (Turner Nashville Network) to pay the bills and started working the Nashville country music scene. The band got noticed. Georgia native and country singer-songwriter “Whispering” Bill Anderson took her demos and introduced her to the industry folks. One of those introductions led to a meeting with the Oak Ridge Boys and she frequently sang back up
with them on stage and recorded her demos at their studio. She recorded six songs with “I Woke Up” making it on the radio charts. She also sang at the Ryman Auditorium on the same bill with Minnie Pearl.

“I loved performing and the music and the audiences,” she says. “But it was the ’80s, and there wasn’t room for a lot of girl singers. You had Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette – that was about it. This was before Shania
Twain and all the others. There wasn’t a lot of call for more girl singers.” Peeples said that she would have continued pursuing her singing career but life intervened. She got pregnant. “ Today you hear about how singers like Faith Hill and Tim McGraw take their kids on the road on these big fancy buses and it sounds like such a wonderful adventure. Well, our bus wasn’t that wonderful for adults, much less kids.”

She and her former husband got off the road and got real jobs. “The whole experience in Nashville was sobering,” she says. “Some of the greatest talent in the town was in bars playing for tips. It takes more than talent. It’s who you know and being in the right place at the right time and having the right sound and look for that time. I’m not saying it wasn’t exciting. It allowed me to be creative, sing and go to label parties and stuff. But I had to transition my creativity from the arts into business smarts.”

As they say, the world is a stage, and Peeples found her next stage. In 1994 she joined the Atlanta Gas Light Co. as a receptionist and worked her way up to natural gas vehicle sales management. In 1996 she left to start her own company, Motivated Inc., a contract sales/marketing and training company. “It was a wonderful ride, and I enjoyed it, but I also enjoyed getting back to the corporate world.”

She followed up with stints as an independent contractor for Employee Solutions Inc., a professional employer organization, and Optimum Energy Solutions, before landing as the vice president of sales and marketing for Peachtree Natural Gas. She worked for Shell Oil Co./Shell Energy LLC and Lennox Industries before coming back in 2004 to AGL Resources. “I was so happy to join the company then,” she says. “There was a new CEO who was committed to marketing and sales. We have fierce competition, commoditization of the product, increasing customer demands and a fragmented and evolving media market. We wanted to create a team that would reach out to our consumers and potential customers and again, it goes back to reaching people’s emotions. That’s what drives everything.”

She is responsible for the sales and marketing efforts in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and New Jersey and has 137 people reporting to her. “With deregulation of the industry, it changed our whole approach. We are marketing to so many different audiences and in new ways. I want to understand our customers’ underlying business needs and determine what communications can do about them.”

Peeples oversees a comprehensive and integrated marketing, sales and fulfillment strategy for all market segments and customer touch points. One of her campaigns was “Dump the Pump,” aimed at enticing users of total electric energy or electric heat pumps to switch to natural gas. Another was encouraging people to cook with gas. “Instant Comfort” reminded homeowners of the reliability and convenience of natural gas. Themarketing mix involves a variety of media outlets, marketing ambassadors, radio and TV shows and a magazine.

Her efforts are working. For the first time, AGL Resources saw its customer base surpass 2.3 million customers. Her campaigns have also won Emmy Awards from the Southeast chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

“This job is so perfect for me because it is a creative outlet – just like singing was. Whether I’m singing it or saying it, I’m selling it. I used to sing for applause, now I sing for market share.”